Speaking engagements built around a single conviction: the organizations that perform at the highest levels are not the ones doing the most — they are the ones thinking most precisely about where to focus.
The Approach
Jay's talks are built around one central argument: that most organizations are working hard in the right direction but thinking about the problem from the wrong starting point.
Whether the audience is a room full of health plan quality leaders, a nonprofit board, or a conference of professionals navigating complex systems — the underlying challenge is often the same. The data is there. The effort is there. The clarity about what the data is actually signaling is not.
"The best speaking engagements do not leave audiences with a list of tactics. They leave with a shift in how they see the problem."
Each talk can be delivered as a standalone keynote, a workshop session, or a breakout — and each can be customized to the specific context and audience of your event. All three connect back to the same core conviction: precision about where you focus changes everything.
Every quality team knows who's in the gap. The question most never fully answer is why — and that distinction is the difference between a 3.5 and a 4 Star plan. This talk introduces the Denominator Intelligence™ framework: a four-dimension approach to understanding not just who is in your denominator, but what's actually standing between them and a closed gap.
Audiences leave with a new mental model for thinking about performance gaps — one that moves the conversation from outreach volume to structural precision. The framework applies equally to Medicare Advantage Stars, value-based care quality metrics, and performance improvement work in healthcare organizations of all types.
This is the talk that started it all — built from a question I asked early in my career that no one around me seemed to be asking, and refined through twelve years of watching organizations repeat the same mistakes with the same data.
Health plan quality and Stars leadership teams · Medicare Advantage quality conferences · Value-based care performance forums · Organizations navigating a Stars plateau
Most health plans don't have a Stars effort problem. They have a Stars focus problem. This talk examines the patterns that lead high-performing quality teams to keep doing more of what isn't working — and introduces a new framework for diagnosing where effort is being deployed versus where it needs to go.
Drawing on regional Stars leadership across 22 states and millions of members, this talk gives quality leaders a concrete model for auditing their current strategy — and a clear picture of what it looks like to redirect resources toward the interventions that actually move the denominator.
VP and Director-level quality leadership · Annual Stars strategy planning sessions · Health plan leadership offsites · QBP and revenue strategy discussions
Most organizations are sitting on more performance data than they know what to do with. This talk isn't about getting more data — it's about learning to ask different questions of the data you already have. The difference between a plan that uses data for reporting and a plan that uses it for decision-making is the difference between managing performance and improving it.
Audiences leave with a practical framework for reorienting their data strategy around the questions that actually drive performance — and a clear view of how the right questions surface the right priorities, the right members, and the right interventions before the measurement window closes.
Quality analytics and data strategy teams · Healthcare technology and health informatics conferences · Value-based care and population health leadership · Organizations building or redesigning quality dashboards
These talks are built for rooms where performance accountability is real — where the audience is carrying the weight of Stars ratings, QBP contracts, or quality improvement targets and looking for a framework that actually shifts how they think about the work.
"I'm not in the room to motivate. I'm in the room to reframe — to give the people doing this work a more precise way of seeing the problem they're already trying to solve."
On the purpose of every speaking engagement
Tell us about your audience, your event format, and the performance challenge you want the room to leave thinking differently about.
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